How it Starts
by Princess Antanasia the Vampire
Summary: Left on earth to save their lives, Amy and Rory can't give up the adventures.  While facing down danger, they meet another couple, who show them the future in a way the Doctor never could.


**Summary:** Left on Earth to save their lives, Amy and Rory can't give up the adventures. While facing down danger, they meet another couple, who show them the future in a way the Doctor never could.

**Author's Note: Hi! It's PAtV, here! Big secret: I'm American. New Yorker, to be exact. And I don't speak British English. Oh, yeah, I can do a stupid imitation of the accent (which does not sound nearly as cool as the real thing) but I certainly don't speak the Queen's English. All the narration is American despite the setting and I'll do my best with the dialogue. As usual, read and review. **

More than anything, Amelia Pond wished the Doctor was there. Actually, it was want Rory wanted, too. There are just some things that the Children of Time just never can re-learn after returning to Earth. How to blindly ignore anything suspicious was one of those things. So it was hardly surprising that when Amy and Rory noticed the little things that had always tipped the Doctor off, they went to investigate. Or, Amy did. Rory just followed her, stammering about how it probably a bad idea. He had been right of course, the two of them were now attempting to ward off an alien that was basically human shaped, but with exaggerated, cartoonish, clearly _other_ features. That and it was trying to communicate with a high pitched squeak. Amy was aiming a heavy duty staple gun at it. Rory was standing behind her. The alien looked panicked and was chattering like a dolphin. Amy, heartened by the thing's fright, advanced.

"Listen, you. I have a friend and he's called the Doctor. If you hurt me or my husband here he'll be very angry. He'll come after you and your entire species." The thing squeaked and whined. Amy stepped closer, holding her staple gun out in front of her. The thing reached out a hand.

"Stay back!" Amy warned. The thing continued to reach. Amy backed away, forgetting about her somewhat effective weapon. It touched Amy's chin, lifting her face so that Amy and the alien were looking eye to eye. Suddenly, Amy's mind was blank. She heard a distant, metallic clang. She vaguely realized she had dropped the staple gun.

"Amy! Amy! Are you all right! Amy!" Amy blinked. Rory's voice hurt her head. She opened her eyes again for the creature. She just stared at it happily.

"Amy!" The thing hissed at Rory. He darted forward and pulled Amy's arm. She fell back against him. She rolled forward on to the balls of her feet, trying to escape Rory and get back to the alien. He closed his arms around her, restraining her.

"Oh, this is a reversal of roles." He muttered. Amy struggled against her husband, desperately trying to return to the thing. Panic was starting to overcome Rory's adrenaline rush.

"Amy!" He protested to his straining wife.

"You!" Rory heard from behind him. "Get down!" Rory did so, dragging Amy down. The speaker, a dark skinned woman, ran past them. She plowed into the alien and brought it as well to the ground. It screeched painfully and it stretched out an arm as it went down. Amy screamed as the thing was attacked. From the tips of its fingers came a tangible wave of energy. A man dark like the woman ran at the fray, with a shield that looked like a welders' mask. He blocked the energy with it then ran farther forward. He took out a gun that looked remarkably like something River would carry. He shot the thing. Amy screamed again, and then stopped struggling. She went limp against him.

"Amy!" He cried and then began checking her vitals. The black woman rushed up to them.

"Mister, I'm a doctor. Let me examine her." He looked at her. Her hair was pulled back in scalping corn rows. She was pretty, but in leather and denim, she didn't look like a doctor.

"Yeah? I may be just a nurse, but I can tell that she's all right. Just unconscious." The other man laughed.

"Here that, sweetheart? You're not the only medical professional in all of reality!" She gave him a reprimanding look and he said,

"Bad joke. Sorry." He picked up Amy's fallen staple gun. "Looks as if you two came prepared." Rory nodded.

"I take it you've seen these things before?" Rory asked with an air of calm. The strangers nodded.

"They have no proper names. Descended from the Cleerion-Delta-68 equivalent of pets. This particular breed was bred to be police dogs, almost. With their own defense mechanism. They took six of them on an intergalactic crime bust. Long story short, they got loose, ended up on Earth. This was the last. We took care of four before this and the other one got hit by a bus." The woman explained this very quickly. Rory nodded.

"Who _are_ you?" Rory asked. He looked down when Amy stirred against him. "Amy!" he cried. She blinked awake.

"Oooh, my head." She groaned.

"Careful…" He warned. She rubbed her temple.

"What happened?"

"You…um…Remember the virtual doctor from the pirate ship? When she sang it sort of…hypnotized everyone she had marked? It was sort of like that…you looked into the thing's eyes and fought to touch it." She blinked at him.

"Virtual doctor?" The strange woman asked.

"Pirate ship?" The man repeated. They looked at each other.

"Who are they?" Amy muttered.

"No idea."

"Right, sorry." The man said. "I'm Mickey Smith, and this lovely woman is my wife Martha."

"How do you know so much about aliens? I'm Amy, by the way. This is Rory." Amy asked.

"Could ask the same about you. And nice to meet you." Martha said. Amy and Rory shared a look.

"We should call him." Rory said quietly. Amy sat up slowly within the confines of her husband's arms. Amy nodded, slowly, then more enthusiastically.

Rory stood, and then helped Amy to. Amy took her staple gun from Mickey. Rory then took it from her.

"You're still disoriented. No weapons for you." Amy whacked his shoulder.

"Stupid." She muttered.

"Yeah, but you love me for it." He steadied her as she tried to take a step and wobbled. "No weapons." He repeated.

"No weapons." She agreed. She pushed Rory's arms away and turned to face Mickey and Martha, who were conversing with each other in hushed tones.

"Listen, thanks. Whoever you are." She turned back to Rory. "Let's go."

"You never really said, though." Mickey said quietly. "How you knew to come prepared. Because it can't be coincidence that you just _happened_ to have your heavy duty staple gun on you when you _ran_ _into_ an alien."

"It's really a long story…" Rory said nervously.

"Let me sum it up for you." Martha said. "You've met Him. The Doctor. Travelled with him. Then he deposited you back on Earth and you can't ever let it be again. Everything is alien because anything else is so boring. You look for the signs, and then you follow them. You become so jaded with life with other humans and you live for the aliens he taught you confront." Neither Pond said a word.

"Thought so." Mickey nodded as he spoke.

"So you two know him as well?" Amy asked. Mickey and Martha nodded.

"He travelled with my girlfriend." Mickey muttered. "He spirited her away, leaving me a suspect in her murder and unable to tell anyone what really happened. Then her mum found out and I was cleared. He invited me to come along but I refused. I saw the way they acted with each other when they were on Earth. I knew she loved him, but I couldn't let her go. I waited.

"Then they crash land around the corner and a stranger stumbles out. It was him; he regenerated. But it went wrong and it seemed like he was dying. It was terrible. That was when I knew I had lost Rose. The way she was so torn up…But I kept waiting anyway. And then I asked to come. I had to do _something_. He said yeah, but Rose…Rose didn't want me around. I had nothing left. I decided to stay on a parallel universe. Stuff happened, you'd know it as the Battle of Canary Wharf, but for those of us who were there, it was the Battle of Torchwood.

"Torchwood had found and made bigger a hole in the skin of the universe. We were able to come through. We fought Cybermen and Daleks that day. Then we returned to our universe. The Doctor saved the day, etcetera, etcetera. But Rose. She was almost sucked into the void. It was the only thing we could do to jump through in time, grab her and bring her back to the parallel universe. But the hole closed itself and she was trapped with us.

"She did everything to get back, and she succeeded. Circumstances, blah, blah, blah. They got to be happy for a few hours. God it hurt. Due to stuff, he had to bring her back to the parallel universe. But I stayed here, because I had met Martha. I had a reason to stay here…" He looked at his wife as finished talking. He smiled at her and took her hand. Amy looked troubled.

"What about you?" Rory asked Martha.

"He was investigating some weird stuff at the teaching hospital I was a student at. He checked in to get access. I went at him with a stethoscope – he has two hearts. He winked and I stayed quiet. Then the hospital was kidnapped and brought to the moon." Martha paused.

"I remember hearing about that on the news." Rory murmured. "They said you were all drugged." Martha shook her head.

"No. Not drugged. Anyway, the Judoon land next to us and started looking for an alien criminal. Things happened, and I ended up saving his life. He invited me to come along. God, he took me to meet Shakespeare; I saw the Empire State building before it was finished, living suns. I saw him rescue a couple from Weeping Angels in present day while trapped in 1969. I fell for him so hard. But he had just lost Rose. I hated the idea of her so much. Then, after a while, I realized he was never going to see me that way and I got out. I joined U.N.I.T. – the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce. I fought aliens from Earth. Then I met Mickey and we went rogue together. We've been living as vigilante alien hunters ever since." She smiled brightly at Mickey. He smiled back.

"Now we've told you about us. What about you two?"

"He crashed in my backyard when I was seven. He had just regenerated and he needed energy. I was alone in the house. I needed help. I was so scared and my Aunt Sharon wouldn't believe me. He said he could help so I let him in. First he raided my kitchen. He didn't know what his new regeneration would like yet. It was an adventure." She smiled to herself. "Then I showed him the crack in my wall. He said it was a crack in time and space and that it was very, very bad. On the other side of the crack was an alien prison – with an escaped prisoner. An escaped prisoner that had gotten out through the crack. Then he had to run back to the TARDIS to prevent it from exploding – he said it was dangerous and that he'd be back in five minutes. He promised. I waited twelve years. Then he came back and it had been five minutes for him. He took care of the Prisoner Zero –" Martha gasped.

"We spent half an hour trying to figure out was going on. 'Prisoner Zero has escaped' on every channel on the television and the radio…The sun went weird!" Amy laughed.

"Yeah. That was it. He stopped Prisoner Zero. Then he left. The TARDIS had just remodeled itself after almost imploding. He intended to come back immediately. But he didn't. He managed to be two years off. He landed in my backyard again the night before our wedding." Amy looked at Rory. "I went with him. We ran. I ran. From commitment. I was afraid. I wanted more time." She looked at Rory again who looked hurt. "I'm sorry." She murmured to him.

"Anyway, we came back to the night before the wedding after a while. I had nearly died. I did something stupid. Very stupid. The Doctor did the right thing – he went to Rory."

"He popped out of the cake at my stag party." Rory muttered. Mickey raised an eyebrow and Martha laughed.

"Yeah. Like I said, he came out of the cake. And I was terrified, because his presence never meant anything good for me. I knew he was back for Amy. Little did I know, right? He's standing in the cake and he tells me that Amy tried to…Well, that Amy did something stupid and then he takes me onto the TARDIS. To keep Amy in check, I think. He said pick anywhere in time or space, as long as it was romantic. Basically he was going to drop us there and not take us home until we worked out…issues or something like that. Of course things went wrong; you know how the story goes. I stayed on the TARDIS then. But then I died and I ceased to exist from all of time and space. She forgot me, but he didn't." Amy took his arm. "And then lots of strange things happened. I was a living plastic Roman. Then I was human again…Because the Doctor made everything go back to normal by editing himself out of time and space. Then all of the sudden, I was marrying the most incredible woman ever and then at the wedding…She brought him back."

"I remembered. Using the old wedding saying. Something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. The TARDIS."

"And then he took both of us."

"And then he left us. He said everyone who travelled with him ended up hurt. He said he was saving our lives when he left us on Earth." Amy was suddenly overcome with melancholy. She gripped Rory tighter. He used his other hand to stroke her hair.

"He was saving you. He's right. Not all of us get our happy ending." Martha gestured when she referred to herself and her husband. "Donna Noble, his best friend. He had to wipe her memory so that her brain didn't burn out. She absorbed part of his DNA from excess regeneration energy. His knowledge in a human mind…Harriet Jones died defending him."

"Harriet Jones, the former prime minister?" Martha nodded.

"His daughter, Jenny. He had a tissue sample taken at gun point. They split they cells, recombined them and grew a person. She had two hearts. She was a Time Lady. Then she took a bullet for him." Martha grimaced.

"Rose Tyler." Mickey continued. "He broke her heart again and again. The worst thing was that he loved her back. Madame De Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XIV, died waiting for him. She loved him, too." Mickey paused.

"Stop it." Amy cried as Martha opened her mouth to pick up where her husband left off.

"And then there are those like us." Martha said. "Like you two. Those who look for the trouble, because life on Earth is so mundane."

"We don't _look_ for trouble." Rory protested weakly.

"Yeah." Agreed Amy. "We just saw the signs and followed them." Martha smiled sadly.

"That's how it starts." She said softly.

She took Mickey's hand and they turned to walk away, leaving Amy and Rory enlightened and terrified in their wake.


End file.
